Jesuit chaplain to U.S. House: Church teaching on homosexuality is a ‘dead end’

May 30, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — In an undated video interview published March 31, 2015, on YouTube, the U.S. House of Representatives Jesuit chaplain declares that Catholic teaching on homosexuality is a "dead end."

He doesn’t stop there. Many of Fr. Patrick Conroy’s statements challenge not only the Magisterium, but they defy natural law.

The high-profile chaplain suggests that Catholic teaching is outdated and has not kept up with the times.

“Now, we have theology on all this stuff and the answer is ‘gays can never engage in this and can never be married,’" he said. "But that’s a theology that goes back centuries before there was any understanding of human psychology, human individuality, human sexuality and all those kinds of understandings of the human psychosis, and the human person that weren’t as complete prior to these kinds of advances in understanding.”

Fr. Conroy is suggesting that teaching on homosexuality is culturally conditioned, and that advancements in understanding in the worlds of psychology, sociology and pastoring lead not to better means of caring for the same-sex attracted but rather to allow, if not encourage, the same-sex attracted to sin.

He continues, “Human beings procreate male-female, but human sexuality isn’t just about that. It’s about so much more ... which is self-evident.”

Fr. Conroy misuses the term ‘self-evident,’ which applies to observable truth. What Fr. Conroy describes as self-evident are observable contortions and breaches of natural law.

There was a popular t-shirt a few years ago at gay pride events that said, “If the hearts fit, the parts fit.” No matter how popular this meme may have been, it’s a falsehood, a wistful statement based on pure emotion and imagination, not fact.

For many, the term “natural law” may hold little or no meaning, but its reality is foreign to no one. Natural law respects human nature exactly as it exists and is clearly evident through observation and reason. The Declaration of Independence draws upon natural law, delivering benefits to its citizens: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In the same way, complementarity is a truth that is self-evident. As sexual beings, men and women are created for each other, as complements to each other. Nature clearly presents the complementarity of man and woman — a quality that is nonexistent in same-sex relationships, where mirror imagery is instead the dominant characteristic.

Like gravity itself, the logic and wisdom of complementarity are inescapable. Like nature itself, complementarity’s simple organic beauty and elegance are undeniably profound.

Assenting to self-evident truths has a way of shining a bright light on the fog of relativism, including the assertion of the goodness of homosexuality and the notion of genderless marriage. Both pale and evaporate when held up to the brilliant light of natural law. All that remains is the exquisite, undeniable truth of complementarity.

Fr. Conroy thinks the Church has a big problem: “The problem ... facing the Catholic Church is what ... what hope does that ever give for a gay or lesbian person who desires just as a heterosexual person desires to commit their life to someone in whom, as Catholics, they have found the presence of the love of Christ; the presence of the meaning of their life in that person.”

This is romanticism laced with sophistry.

Pope St. John Paul II said, “[S]pousal love permits us to understand in a certain way the mystery which for ages was hidden in God, and which in turn was realized by Christ, as a love proper to a total and irrevocable gift of self on the part of God to man in Christ.”

Homosexual ‘marriage’ serves only to mock this relationship, as if Christ could be satisfied loving himself, and as if the Church were not created for Christ. It’s an outright rejection of what JPII referred to as the primordial sacrament of Christ’s spousal love for the Church, and for each and every member of the human race.

Contrary to Fr. Conroy’s assertion, far from being a “dead end,” the Church’s teaching on sexuality and marriage brings life to all, especially to those plagued by same-sex attraction.

LGBT activists and their progressive media, government and corporate allies yell loudly in order to suppress natural law from both our consciousness and public debate, but they will never succeed.

Now some clerics, like Fr. Conroy, seek to do the same. Yet they can only temporarily distract because truth is immutable. Reason and nature itself make the erasure of natural law utterly impossible.

Turning a blind eye to natural law and, in particular, to complementarity initially appears compassionate, even salvific. But it comes with an enormous price tag, an unforgivable debt that none of us can afford to pay because it encourages sin.

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children's rights activist. He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs. Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.